The bodies buried in the bog
When things fall into bogs, they sometimes wind up being beautifully preserved. This includes bodies, sometimes dating back thousands of yea...
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Unexplainable
Unexplainable is a science show about everything we don’t know. Host Noam Hassenfeld is joined by an array of experts and Vox reporters each week to look at the most fascinating unanswered q...
Episodes
20 of 313 episodesWhat happened to the giant bugs?
Once upon a time (around 300 million years ago), Earth was home to massive dragonfly-like insects and two meter long millipede-like creature...
Dark matter and the end of answers
Five-sixths of all the matter in the universe is this invisible stuff called dark matter, and scientists barely understand what it is. So wh...
What happened before the big bang?
It's a question that seems impossible to grapple with, but scientists won't take no for an answer. In this collaboration with Scientific Ame...
What's the oldest story ever told?
An astrophysicist uses the motion of the stars to argue that a single story has been told for 100,000 years. A cognitive anthropologist has...
Stopping the science that could stop the world
When scientists write their own rules for life, how do they know what could go wrong before it’s too late? This is the final episode of our...
A breakthrough in synthetic life
Synthetic biologist Kate Adamala has been making major headlines as her lab creates cells that feed, divide, and grow — all from nonliving p...
Life from scratch
Scientists stripped a cell down to its most essential genes in order to find out what makes life...alive. What they found was more bizarre t...
The idea of a song
A few hundred milliseconds are often all you need to recognize a song, but a lot of recent hits have moved away from intros. Our friends at...
Why can’t I remember being a baby?
And if babies forget their earliest experiences, do they still matter? This episode is a collaboration with Vox's Explain It to Me podcast G...
Can these corals take the heat?
Warming waters are an existential threat to coral reefs, and for people who want to restore them. But in the Republic of Palau, researchers...
Why Hank Green takes pseudoscience seriously
Dismissing pseudoscience is too easy. Understanding why it spreads so quickly is harder. It can teach us why real science works and how to s...
A trip to the twilight reefs
Down beneath the waves, where the light starts to fade, there's an ecosystem scientists don't fully understand. About a decade ago, some res...
The hidden world that birds see
Birds navigate using Earth’s magnetic field, but scientists still don’t know how they actually sense it. Called the holy grail of sensory bi...
The Godzilla El Niño
This global weather phenomenon could help make 2027 the hottest year on record. Our friends at The Gray Area explore what the upcoming El Ni...
An argument for the sun
It can be hard to know how to interact with the sun. Some people have swung to opposite ends of the spectrum — either over-tanning or avoidi...
What the Odyssey is hiding
The Late Bronze Age, when the Trojan War supposedly took place, was way more modern than Homer made it seem. But around 1177 BCE, a vast net...
Dinosaur mysteries with Riley Black
How do we know what we know about dinosaurs? Riley Black takes us back to the Mesozoic Era and explains how paleontologists piece together t...
When doctors don't know what's wrong
A 2015 review found that most people in the US will experience a diagnostic error in their lifetime. Some of those errors are less devastati...
Are you a lyric person or a music person?
When people listen to songs, why do some people pay more attention to the music, and some people pay more attention to the lyrics? The answe...